Posts tagged ‘Scott Free Productions’

Well, gee whiz, that’s a bit of a disappointment … news broke yesterday that CBS cancelled BrainDead. So … time to dig into my backlog and write this one up. The paragraphs below were written before the cancellation announcement.

BrainDead has got to be the most brilliant show that I’ve seen on broadcast television in an extremely long time! Invasion Of The Body Snatchers meets All The President’s Men by way of space bugs!

Everyone was excellent; Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Danny Pino, Tony Shalhoub, Aaron Tveit, Johnny Ray Gill … I could go on to name all of them, but hey, just look ’em up on Wikipedia or IMDB. And the absolutely most brilliant aspect of the show was to have Jonathan Coulton sing for the recaps of previous episodes. The show made me laugh, the show made me yell at the TV (in a good way), the show made me want to see the next episode right away without having to wait a week … I’m racking my (remaining) brains trying to think of anything that I didn’t like about the show, and I honestly can’t think of anything.

Alas, the overall ratings weren’t quite up to par, so I’ll be very surprised if we end up seeing any more episodes. Especially since Tony Shalhoub has reportedly signed on for the Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s The Price. On one hand, that’s a bad thing, because I’ll really miss this show. On the other hand, that’s a good thing … they were able to wrap things up well enough in this thirteen episode run that the season finale could easily function as a series finale. If it ends there, I’ll be happy with the quality of the thirteen episodes that we have. That’s far far better than shows that don’t know when to stop and keep going long after their entertainment value has worn away (Big Bang Theory and Red Dwarf, I’m a-lookin’ at youse!).

I haven’t bothered watching any of Amazon’s myriad pilots … until now. And wow, this is good. Impressively good, even for a cynical longtime Philip K. Dick fan.

On one hand, this makes me want to go back and read the book that inspired it. It has been way way too long since I last read that.

On the other hand, this makes me want to completely avoid the book that inspired it. The differences between this and the source material are intriguing enough that I would love to see where Frank Spotnitz ends up going with it.

On the gripping hand, I damn well hope that Amazon eventually greenlights this! The worldbuilding on display here is downright beautiful and I really want to see it explored further. All I can do is encourage everyone reading this to please take Amazon’s survey and vote in favor of more episodes for The Man In The High Castle.